Escape

Ger leans back into the seat and stretches his long legs out before him. He should be feeling joyful, but his smiles cracks off his face like old plaster.

Nobody came to wave him off. Mum and Dad are too busy in the caff, chewing over Chelsee’s news. Don’t tell, she’d said. Of course he told. Chelsee must have known that he would. Intended that he should.

With a slick hum the train moves off. The whinging child at the other end of the carriage runs up the carriage, hollering. Cadell. It would be. Spoiled brat. Ger glares at him. Cadell’s face falls and he retreats.

The train gathers speed and the images flick past, beginning to dizzy him. He shuts his eyes but older images flick past, burned onto his retinas. Mum and Dad aghast. Mum pragmatic after the initial shock, Dad… Dad just weird about it.

Ger’s eyes snap open, and the world speeds past. Sickness tugs his guts. He swaps seats and now he is looking back. But that is worse.

The train slows, stops at the next station. Rachel, Tanya and Cadell get off the train in a tangle of pushchair and bags. Ger knows he should have helped, should have been a gentleman. But if he’d stood up he would have got off too, and taken the next train home.


Linda Gruchy

Darius Bredwyn Is Loved

Following disturbing allegations about Douglas Bruton's working habits I no longer feel comfortable including his work in Greyling Bay, and so have deleted the four pieces which were attributed to him here.

For more information read this post on Vanessa Gebbie's blog, and this post on my main blog, How Publishing Really Works.

Apologies for any difficulties this might cause.



About The Contributors

Greyling Bay Café

Chelsee crushed the sweat from her forehead with the tea towel then looked round, her neck burning under the collar of her overall. Nobody had noticed. She breathed out, and a popper on the overall unpopped.

The dreary woman sat by the radiator stirring her tea to death, staring out across the bay. She probably thought the caff was too working class. Stuck up, miserable cow.

Another dribble of sweat ran down behind Chelsee’s ear. She shuddered. Tanya and Rachel were huddled over their drinks, laughing, co-conspirators. Rachel twisted her wedding ring as she sniggered over some bitching titbit, and slid a sideways glance at Chelsee.

Cadell the heroic, Cadell the wonderful, Cadell the two year old prodigy wriggled free of the chair, clutching the biscuit he’d been mumbling over and toddled over to the dreary staring woman. Chelsee hoped he would smear the soggy biscuit over Mrs Snootyboots, draw on her like a blackboard, but he didn’t.

Sweat trickled down the valley between her buttocks. So freezing outside, so hot inside. They called it a bun in the oven, didn’t they? But this wasn’t a bun, it was a time-bomb, tick-tick-ticking away. She blundered to the loo, grasping the seat with both hands as she puked. Great chunks of envy soured with despair.

She looked at her wrists, porcelain thin, poking out of last year’s cardigan. The thin tracery of old scars freshly overlaid by the purple and yellow from where dad had mashed her flesh with hands hard as coal.

He’d kill her when he found out. He’d bloody kill her.


Linda Gruchy

Invisible Ice

Louise hunched against the radiator. The café was steamy but no heat reached across the counter to the customers even though the skinny woman brewing up tea had sweat running down her forehead. Maybe the cold is inside me, Louise wondered: maybe I should be drinking antifreeze? Hysteria threatened, sourness rising in her throat. She picked up her mug of tea using both hands to steady it.

Well, here I am, though God knows where “here” is.

She had slammed the door behind her, tossed the keys on to the estate agent’s desk and gunned the car towards the motorway. Go West, young woman. It would be difficult to go much further west without swimming, so here she was. Car parked outside the B & B, suitcase unpacked, registered for a week while she looked for somewhere to live, details already with a local agency.

A “stranger in a strange land”. “New beginning;” “fresh fields”. All that kind of crap. The lifeline she was clutching at was that nobody knew where she was. Dead to the world. Old life over. Gone. Andrew would search for her, of course, and he’d be efficient. Efficiency was his middle name after all; well no, actually his middle name was Daniel, but still.... Discreet questions, that’s how he’d start, then phone calls, online enquiries, perhaps even a detective; he’d try the lot but he would fail. Dogged Daniel, dogging her footsteps. The view from the steamy window was bleak and the beach deserted apart from an old man shouting at the seagulls and another figure (male? female? hard to tell) standing in front of an easel, wrapped up against the chill and painting the old man’s picture. If I walked into the sea, would they stop me, she shivered: would they even see me? I think I’m invisible; I’m nothing. A nothing-creature made of invisible ice.

“I got a bikkit,” confided a small voice at her elbow, startling her out of the dark thoughts. It was a small, round child, not obviously male or female, just a generic toddler creature. It held something up to view. “It’s a rectangliar bikkit.”

“Don’t bother the lady, darling.” The mother sounded half-hearted, deep in conversation and, the gesture made, she turned back to her friend.

“Look,” the small voice was polite but persistent. “There’s bumps on my bikkit. There’s ninety-seventy-nine.”

Louise stared at the child and mumbled something that seemed to satisfy its proud boast, then she exhaled a long, sighing breath.

Not invisible then, after all.

It was a start.


Nicola Slade